10 Worst Mansplainers on the Internet (or Anywhere)

Soon-to-be-former Texas governor Rick Perry joined the ranks of mansplainers last week when he said of Texas Senator Wendy Davis at the National Right to Life Convention in Dallas:

She was the daughter of single woman, she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas Senate. It’s just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.

For offering his patronizing assessment of Senator Wendy Davis’ biography, with some editorializing, Perry’s ad-libbed remarks have been widely broadcast ’round the Internet. It has gained him recognition, as well as infamy, as the “Mansplainer-in-Chief,” ever eager to explain to women what to do with their bodies, simplify that oh-so-complicated financial “stuff” and more.

Perry joins a not exactly august company of mansplaining types:

1. Ron Johnson

Representative Tammy Baldwin (a Democrat) became Wisconsin’s new senator in 2012; she had previously been in Congress since 1999. Nonetheless, Representative Ron Johnson (a Republican who took office in 2011), thought fit to say that “hopefully I can sit down and lay out for her my best understanding of the federal budget because they’re simply the facts.”

Baldwin let Johnson know she is already quite well informed as she was a “double major in college in mathematics and political science, and… served for six years on the House Budget Committee in [her] first six years in the House”.

2. Dylan Byers

After President Obama “reminded us … that even progressive leaders can be sexist“ via his comment that California attorney general Kamala Harris is “the best-looking attorney general in the country,” Politico writer Dylan Byerstweeted “How did it become so difficult to call a woman good looking in public?” Clearly it has become too easy for a man to let his sexist views slip out in public and all across the Internet.

“No one is denying that being a mother is a tough job; I remember I was a handful. But you know there is a big difference between being a mother, and that tough job, and getting your ass out the door at 7 a.m. when it’s cold, having to deal with the boss, being in a workplace, or even if you’re unhappy you can’t show it for eight hours.”

Those who do not only the “tough job” of being a mother but also the other sorts of “workplace” jobs Maher refers to may continue to be rightfully indignant.

7. Erick Erickson

Fox News harbors many a mansplainer, but Conservative blogger Erick Erickson’s remarks about women as breadwinners are particularly out-of-date:

“When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society, and other animals, the male typically is the dominant role.”

The women’s role? She’s just “complementary.”

Erickson has also informed women that our wanting to “have it all” is “the crux of the problem” and that feminists are “too ugly to get a date” and have “no sense of humor” — criticisms about women that are as old as the hills; postcards from the early 20th century show that suffragettes were routinely drawn as “ugly, mean spinsters.”

Discrimination “doesn’t drive it and it’s not clear that government can eliminate it — or should even try” because, ultimately, women themselves are to blame.

Yes, according to Ponnuru, we women just choose to make less than men and are just “more likely” to work part-time and take lower-paying jobs — I guess, like Erickson, it must be something about our biology.

9. Tony Abbott

The leader of Australia’s opposition Liberal Party — who hosted a fundraiser whose menu offered a dish that made repulsive references to former Prime Minister Julia Gillard‘s body — is on the record for too many sexist comments for us to keep track.

One example however came when he once noted that “the problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience.”